I miss clicking around the channels with old remotes!

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by DaveWM

I like my maggie phantom with the doggie whistle, and I get a nice Kerchunk with the tuner and the volume (3 whole steps). I have to kerchunk my way to the UHF position to turn it off (not uhf equipped).

Is the Magnavox TV you're referring to the same Maggie 3-way console you've been working on? I have a friend whose parents had a 19" (IIRC) Maggie table model set (all channel, again IIRC) with the "Phantom" remote, which worked well for them the many years they had it; it is long gone today, having been replaced years ago, the last I heard, by a Fisher 25" color console. For all I know now, they may have scrapped the Fisher set and gotten a new HD flat panel with digital tuner, 5.1-channel sound, the whole nine yards.

I didn't know the Magnavox 3-way entertainment centers used the UHF position of the tuner to turn off the set (in those sets without UHF, of course). I can see this feature being used in their remote portables (my friend's folks' Maggie probably had it, but if it did, as far as I know they never used it), but I've never seen any of their earlier consoles advertised as having the power-off function accessed via the UHF position of the VHF tuner. I'll download some old Maggie brochures tonight and look at the ads, as I'm interested in how Magnavox achieved remote control of their sets of that era; what functions were included on the hand unit, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if Magnavox TVs of 45 years ago also had motorized tint and color controls in addition to channel up/down and volume, as did the high-end mid-'60s Zeniths I mentioned. Magnavox, in its day, made and marketed several high-end TV and combination TV/AM-FM/phono consoles, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were in direct and very heated competition with Zenith (which had its own line of such sets) during that time as well.

I'm surprised Magnavox's remote TVs of the '60s only had four-step volume control, with the fourth step (if there was one) being the audio mute function. I would have thought the remote would have been set up for continuously variable volume adjustment, using a motor to turn the control itself--not unlike the remote color/hue adjustments on mid-'60s Zenith color sets, in which the volume up/down buttons on the hand control unit acted as remote color controls when the sound was muted. The buttons activated motors which physically turned the tint and color controls, allowing remote changes of color and hue (or tint) as the viewer deemed necessary.